What is Appropriate & What is Not on The Economic Populist

Answer: Any statement that cannot be backed up in statistical fact and theory.

Question: What happens if I write Economic Fiction?

Answer: It depends on the severity.

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Posting comments to promote a business or website. Examples are payday loans or selling gold, credit cards. If you wish to advertise on The Economic Populist, please contact us but product comment spam is not tolerated. We will not advertise scams or predatory lending.

Writing an Economic Fiction post which has no basis in statistics or theory

Promoting violence

Racism

Hatred

Conspiracy theorist statements

Question: What is a conspiracy theorist statement?

Answer: Something which cannot be proved in historic or statistical fact.

Examples are:

The Federal Reserve are the Illuminati

All Economic theory is wrong

Money is a plot to enslave all people

Question: What is off topic?

Answer: Anything not based in logic, statistic fact and not directly related to the topics of economics in some fashion. Examples are:

Abortion is immoral, life begins at conception

Indians are the new Aryan race

People are lazy, stupid and immoral

Question: I do not understand why this is a problem, can you be more specific?

Answer: If you do not understand this post, the rules or why such comments and topics are a problem, maybe you should consider looking for another community blog. It's a big Internet and The Economic Populist is an economics based community blog only. Our goal, from a layman's perspective, is to focus on reality based policy, theory and fact....not promote more spin, confusion and fiction.

As a tool of capitalist hegemony the doctrine of general equilibrium is very useful. It assumes that the normal condition of society is for the state to play as little a role in economic life as possible, because the market is part of human nature and the most efficient form of economic organization. The theory, therefore, has a role in legitimizing capitalist hegemony.

A tool of capitalist hegemony? My, what harsh language! One can almost visualize GE theorists visiting smoke-filled rooms to accept bribes from their cigar-puffing benefactors. Indeed, Post-Autistic economists, after observing the word “axiomatic” in the title of my book (Aguilar, 1999), dismissed it out-of-hand, denouncing me as a bought-and-paid-for stooge of Big Business. Apparently, just that one word was enough to convince them of this about me.

But before we dismiss this talk of an epistemological approach being a “tool” of Big Business to “legitimize” their obviously anti-social behavior, let us at least see if the socialists are consistent. James Yunker (2007) writes:

This article evaluates the performance of contemporary capitalism relative to that of a hypothetical alternative designated “profit-oriented market socialism.” In most respects, profit-oriented market socialism would closely mimic contemporary market capitalism. The major difference would be that most profits and interest generated by the operations of publicly-owned business enterprises would be distributed to the general public as a social dividend proportional to household wage and salary income rather than in proportion to household financial assets. The basis of the comparison is a small-scale but comprehensive computable general equilibrium model.

Here we read that GE Theory is not a tool of capitalist hegemony, but a tool of profit-oriented market socialism, that is, publicly-owned business enterprises (e.g. Fannie, Freddie, AIG, etc.) that mimic contemporary market capitalism. And it is not a “tool” in the sense of legitimizing the socialists (presumably, their legitimacy is derived from emotional appeals of the “Gosh, there sure are a lot of poor people – darn capitalists!” variety), but a tool in the literal sense of defining a software model.

Well, which is it? Reglar thinks that GE Theory "assumes that the normal condition of society is for the state to play as little a role in economic life as possible." Yunker sees GE Theory as the basis for a central planner to "mimic contemporary market capitalism" while retaining for himself the authority to distribute the social dividend – hardly a "little role in economic life."

The primary (actually, the only) criticism that socialists have of my writing is that it lacks “substantial references.” Apparently, he whose writing is filled with the most quotations from the most august of academic journals wins. Thus, having observed that Reglar and Yunker have opposite views of GE Theory, we clearly need a tie-breaker. Cristobal Young (2005) writes:

General equilibrium theory – the mathematical analysis of a market economy as a whole – has its roots in the late 19th century works of Leon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto… However, the project failed to attract much following and soon faded into dormancy.

It was the end of the Great Depression, ironically, that saw a tremendous revival of the General Equilibrium (GE)/Welfare economics project. In the US, a loose grouping of devout socialists were busy detailing the elegance of the market equilibrium. The leaders of the GE revival – Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner and Abram Bergson – were cutting-edge mathematical economists and true believers in Soviet-style central planning…

For an economic system that failed to satisfy such assumptions, there seemed a need for government intervention. General equilibrium theory provided a sort of checklist for market critics.

Young supports Yunker’s position though, while they agree that central planning is the inevitable result of economists' acceptance of GE Theory, Young see this as a bad thing and Yunker sees it as a good thing. Nevertheless, the Review of Political Economy and the SSRN trumps an obscure conference of socialists idling on the taxpayer’s dime, drinking tea and refining their plans for world conquest. Two out of three quotes wins!

Steve Keen (2007, p. 173) has also observed that satisfying the ever-growing list of assumptions made by Debreu and his followers is “unrealistic”:

It is almost superfluous to describe the core assumptions of Debreu’s model as unrealistic: a single point in time at which all production and exchange for all time is determined; a set of commodities – including those which will be produced in the distant future – which is known to all consumers; producers who know all the inputs that will ever be needed to produce their commodities; even a vision of “uncertainty” in which the possible states of the future are already known, so that certainty and uncertainty are formally identical. Yet even with these breathtaking dismissals of essential elements of the real world, Debreu’s model was rapidly shown to need additional restrictive assumptions.

In the context of GE Theory, the conditions required for capitalism to be efficient are implausible in practice, though conceivable in theory. The former implies that the free market is always inefficient. The latter implies that a central planner can mimic how capitalism would work if it were efficient while the "profits and interest generated by the operations of publicly-owned business enterprises would be distributed to the general public as a social dividend."

In the context of GE Theory, there is no way for libertarians to get around this dilemma without being impaled on one or the other horn. Either we live with a system that can never be efficient in practice or we have an efficient system but renounce private property rights and put distribution of the "social dividend" in the hands of a central planner.

Far from being a “tool of capitalist hegemony," acceptance of GE Theory is the death of capitalism. Our only compensation is that, like a condemned prisoner who gets to choose the firing squad or the hangman, we get to choose inefficiency or tyranny. How did free-market economists respond to this dreadful choice? Milton Friedman invoked his famous “assumptions don’t matter” dictum (1953) to avoid having to admit that he could not untie the Gordian knot of GE Theory – but that is cowardice. Surely there must be a better way!

Instead of attempting to untie it, I cut the Gordian knot of GE Theory by throwing all of Walras’ and Pareto’s assumptions overboard and starting from scratch with my own set of axioms. When faced with a dilemma "in the context of GE Theory," I invented Axiomatic Economics. As Hannibal Barca said, "we will either find a way, or make one." The same goes for libertarians; we will never accept socialism.

Robert, I don't think anyone here is subject to being snoockered. I, too, am highly critical in my analytics.
Grozny's position just seemed more like metaphysics. Not totally clear about what his basic assumptions were to support his "axiomatic" premise.

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metaphysics is not "on topic". Believe me, there are plenty of people out there with all sorts of "theories". But when someone posts out some basic algebraic inequalities claiming this is a new "economic theory", sorry, that's enough for me.

There is already plenty of confusion, misinformation on what actually works, what the theory actually is. So many people have great difficulty with mathematical equations and I've seen even some "name brand" research where they put some fictional mathematics in it which actually doesn't prove anything due to either invalid assumptions or bad math. I mean let's look at CDOs themselves. Talk about some serious bad math, they are based on CDS evaluations, which themselves have only been in existence for about a decade. So, we don't need more fictional mathematics being promoted.

We are a layman's blog but that said, the idea is to let people learn, reason, discuss the real details, facts....
not to be a place to enable more stuff that's so "off" it lends itself to rense.com type of beliefs (although sometimes this site is very fun! I love CT for entertainment purposes!)

Point is there are plenty of other sites.

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is that you had hedge funds running off this type of thinking. There was, I remember on CNBC several years back, these two guys in London who ran a black box operation that claimed to use fuzzy logic (not sure how) to game the difference between the various spot metals contracts on the LME. I think one of those guys killed himself while the other went missing or living in a van in Glascow.

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Grozny has made two threads on an ethics forum -- the main one here -- on whether you were right or wrong to ban him from this forum and at the very least the other side involved should be aware of this discussion.

He seems to have some personality problems, but from what I read here it seems that he was just too far off topic. Either way, it's your website and I don't see any ethical issue with banning him.

What I am most curious to know is what the "divide" is between him and the posters here. He seems to describe you guys as "post-autistics". I've read a bit on the debate and I've explained myself in the thread I linked to, but I'd be curious to better understand what the deal is and Grozny seems a bit too emotive to be the one to help me figure this one out, so I turn to you.

Cheers.

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He showed up, violated multiple rules and was gone from site in probably less than 12 hours.

We're not a self-help group or a walk in clinic, we're an economics site.

In terms of the difference, I really don't know what to say except we are an economics community blog and one cannot use the site to write nonsense. Keynesian vs. Hayek vs. Behavioral economists is not what I refer to in this statement.

I scanned some of the comments on your thread and I think you're seeing the picture.

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EP, because we allow anyone to write posts, periodically a crazy or conspiracy theorist will spam the site.

If you see this please use the down arrows. Enough votes will unpublish such stuff very quickly and thus remove it from the site. The same is true with troll ratings on comments. Enough troll ratings and the comment will disappear from view.

You can also email me and alert me to what's going on.

Also, don't forget to uprate posts you want to see on the front page.

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Folks, I just got an email by a notorious spin machine, corporate funded lobbyist organization to write up their "white paper".

Just a reminder, NEVER use a "white paper" from some special interest/lobbyist group. You must ALWAYS read the assumptions the fine print and data missing...

this is true from Academic research too but it gets even worse when dealing with special interest groups, lobbyists because they have their agendas and damn the macro econ stats and theory!

Seriously, watch out and always read the details, looking for that subtle statistical spin, usually buried and sometimes you have to figure it out for yourself to find the fatal logic/assumption/statistical/theoretical flaw.

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Plain text

As you probably all know, we run ads on this site to help pay for servers and administration costs. Believe me, we're not getting rich or is it even covering those costs

We use Google Adsense, which is not the best to keep "bad ads" off of the site.

Much to my horror this morning, I look over to see a highly ridiculous, conservative agenda group's ads smothered all over the site.

Now, when I see these types of ads, I can block them, but as admin, normally the ads are blocked from my view so I, as site administrator, do not view them or click on them.

So....if you see a really "bad ad" on this site, please alert me via the email contact so I can get it out of here.

We should be getting investment ads, even physical gold buy ads, economics ads, even some political ads, but this one was just.....well, there sure are a lot of corporate funded agenda groups out there, trying to cast themselves as grassroots, that's all I can say! It's bad enough getting folks to focus in on economics by the numbers, I think the last thing we need is to promote corporate agenda politics which are being masked as grassroots!

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Folks, The Economic Populist is an economics site. Please read the FAQ and the user guide, as well as the admin forum BEFORE writing anything! This site REQUIRES all posts be detailed, with CREDIBLE economic analysis, references and citations. That is everything on this site beyond writing a comment and participating in the discussion below posts. Posts are forum posts, or Instapopulists and blog posts.

POSTS WHICH VIOLATE THE SITE RULES WILL BE DELETED.

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Keep the quality of the site up and there is plenty of action in the comments, you can track your discussions via your workspace. There you will see your comments and the replies to them.

Thanks for keeping the quality and credibility of The Economic Populist on maximum high.

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